Where a spiritual descendant of Sir William Osler and Abbie Hoffman holds forth on issues of medicine, media and politics. Mostly.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Billy Rubin Blog Hero & Villain Of The Year (and Year-End Book Review)

"It's an honor just to be nominated," crowed sex columnist Dan Savage in response to Andrew Sullivan's listing of Savage in his poll for the "Moore Award". Sullivan, in his Daily Beast blog "The Dish", has a variety of year-end awards, and his "Moore" award (named after the lefty agitpropster filmmaker Michael Moore) is for "divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric". Savage garnered a nomination this year, and has thus far worn that nomination like a badge. As of this writing, with just under 10,000 votes cast, Savage is comfortably in the lead with more than 58 percent of the vote in a field of ten candidates--a sum that Mitt Romney dreams about even more than Sugar Plum Fairies as we close in on the Iowa Caucuses. (What Simon Winchester, whose entire collected works I have nearly finished over the past few years, has said or written to be included in this group is unknown to me, but it must have been a doozy, since under normal circumstances one would not describe his utterances as remotely extreme.)

Savage's nomination came as a result of a dustup between him and soon-to-be-former-candidate-for-President Representative Michele Bachmann back in September during the Republican Presidential debates. At that time, Bachmann was indulging in one of her favorite political tactics in order to separate herself from her rivals and recover some of the mojo she had lost over the summer when she had been the darling of the party and led in the polls.

That tactic would involve departing entirely from reality and making up whatever stuff she deemed suitable to rile up sufficiently nitwitted partisans, as she did earlier in the campaign when she attacked Michelle Obama for advocating breastfeeding by supporting a tax break for breast pumps, turning the tax break into a right-wing fantasy that the government was "going out to buy my breast pump". In the September debate, Bachmann had decided to stake out the anti-vaccine territory to stick it to Texas Governor Rick Perry, who was then leading in the polls. In 2007, Perry had admirably issued an executive order mandating that Texas girls receive access to the HPV vaccine, a major cause of cervical cancer as well as other maladies. That order was later overturned by the Texas legislature, causing Perry to quip--correctly--that the bill's supporters were effectively killing women who would needlessly die from the cancer.

Within two days of the blowup, Savage wrote a brief dispatch on the matter, noting that her "comments" on the HPV vaccine were much more accurately described as "lies". Then he let his savage pen loose, noting the following:

Bachmann and her ilk believe that woman [sic] who have sex—along with men who fail to purchase health insurance—deserve to die horrible deaths. That's why they hate the HPV vaccine, that's why they fought its introduction, that's why they tell lies about it now. Because they want women to die.

Presumably, Savage meant something more along the lines of "women who have premarital or extramarital sex". Regardless, Savage's characterization of Bachmann was unquestionably intemperate. It was obviously divisive. It was unambigously bitter. Thus, by Andrew Sullivan's criteria, an ideal nominee for his award!

Only one matter bears mention: Savage was almost certainly correct. And for that we name one of our favorite columnists, Dan Savage, for the Billy Rubin Blog Hero Of The Year, and his public foil, soon-to-be-just-Representative Michele Bachmann, for the Billy Rubin Blog Villain Of The Year. Happy 2011, y'all.
--br

PS--In other news, we've been catching up on our reading around here and want to give a special shout-out to the following books, most of which came out in 2010, but we're almost never that up to date on our reading until someone actually pays us to write this blog. Besides, these books will have a shelf life to come, so please do consider them if you want to read excellent books on medicine:

The Emperor of All Maladies--Siddhartha Mukherjee's phenomenal "biography" of cancer. Though the subject matter may seem intimidating and depressing, Mukherjee takes the reader along on a ride that is suffused with the insight of a great clinician, the wonder of a thoughtful scientist, and the humanity of a fine writer. For his work he won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and appropriately so. (Readers wanting to delve further into cancer literature might consider watching a Japanese film that received almost zero attention in the US, 1778 Stories of Me and My Wife, detailing the struggles of a writer and his cancer-stricken spouse. Be forewarned, however, that it makes the phrase "gut-wrenching" seem inadequate. I watched it on a flight from Europe to the US, and by they end the Dutch people around me practically had to carry my sobbing ass out on a litter.)

The Panic Virus--Seth Mnookin's book about the vaccine-causes-autism movement. An excellent primer on vaccine hysteria, narrower in scope than Arthur Allen's Vaccine but no less important or readable.

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About Me

I'm a physician and an educator with a clinical focus in infectious disease. I teach the spectrum from 3rd year medical students through senior ID fellows, and try to keep everyone loose when doing so. Whether I succeed or not, you'll have to ask them.
I am interested in issues where medicine intersects with politics, as well as how medical research is portrayed by media. In some ways my views are very much at the fringe of the rest of the physician community, although in several other critical ways I’m your typical stethoscope-wielding, white-coat-wearing, reflex-hammer-tapping doc and consider myself steeped in the traditions of the brotherhood and sisterhood.